A vinyl release celebration for Roadkill!!! Greatest Hits! A Roadkill Opera will be held beginning at 2 pm Chicago time, Saturday, October 5, 2024, at Vintage Vinyl (925 Davis Street, Evanston, IL, 60201), the iconic vinyl record store immortalized in the film High Fidelity. 

Writer/producer/performer Stephan Alexander Parker, who worked as a light and sound man from 1979 to 1983 in Evanston’s rock and punk scene (The Front Lines, Group Gomez, Fat Lewy, Peer Group, The Bombastics) and Northwestern University’s theatre scene (The Mee-Ow Show (five seasons); Hot Rhythm; Diamonds and Dust; The Decameron; and Frank Galati‘s Blood of the Walsungs), will be on hand to sign copies of his double LP project.

Roadkill!!! Greatest Hits! A Roadkill Opera is being officially released Tuesday, October 1, 2024, to commemorate the North American premiere that evening of Ferdinando Paer’s 1804 opera Leonora at Chicago Opera Theatre. It is exclusively available as a Direct Metal Mastered, two-disc, 180 gram, gatefold LP. A Roadkill Opera is a new opera by Stephan Alexander Parker built on the music of the first act of Paer’s Leonora.

The 2024 vinyl release includes in its entirety the 2013 chamber orchestra studio recording of A Roadkill Opera on three sides. The fourth side is devoted to Chicago-style improv sketch comedy by the outfit whose true story is told in the new opera, the Roadkill On A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company (active 1988 to 1992 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming) recorded live at their 1992 show Roadkill!!! Greatest Hits! 

The Vintage Vinyl event will also include a new companion book: Hungry Men Don’t Swerve. That book details how Parker’s randomly recording  Leonora off a WFMT broadcast in 1979-1980 led to a 24-year search to identify the recording; a 2012 workshop and 2013 studio recording of Parker’s new opera; attending the 2015 GRAMMYs; and six fully staged performances of A Roadkill Opera in 2016, two with the full Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia.

In addition to the 2024 gatefold double LP and companion book, the opera libretto and books of sheet music for the singers and orchestra will also be available:

A Roadkill Opera: Silver Dollar Showroom Edition

A Roadkill Opera: Piano/Vocal

A Roadkill Opera: Conductor’s Score

A Roadkill Opera: Parts for Wind Instruments

A Roadkill Opera: Parts for Timpani and String Instruments

A Roadkill Opera Overture: Conductor’s Score & Parts

Those who cannot make it to the in-person event can order through Vintage Vinyl‘s mail order division at https://vvmo.com/ or mail@vvmo.com

A Roadkill Opera tells the story of the hour before the lights go up on opening night for a comedy improv troupe in Jackson Hole, Wyoming—the Roadkill On A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company. Based (loosely) on a true story from a fast-developing tourist town, this original English libretto by Parker is set to music by Ferdinando Paer (a direct competitor of Beethoven and Napoleon’s maître de chapelle).

In June 2012 A Roadkill Opera was workshopped in Crystal City, Virginia, by Jeffrey Dokken at Artomatic, the Washington DC area’s largest free creative arts event. Dokken, currently the music director for the National Football League’s Washington Commanders, served as music director and conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia from 2010 to 2023. Maestro Dokken reassembled most of the 2012 workshop’s chamber orchestra and singers in 2013 for a series of recording sessions in Maryland.

The cast for the studio opera recording includes Laura Wehrmeyer (Holly), soprano; Andrew Webster (Eddie), baritone; David Timpane (Stephan), baritone; Krista Monique McClellan (Debby), soprano; and Jeffrey Dokken (Dave), tenor.

The chamber orchestra for the opera recording includes Martine Micozzi, flute; Jeannine Altavilla, clarinet; Sarah Robinson, bassoon; Michael Thompson, trumpet; Jeffrey Dokken, timpani; Frank Peracchia, violin I; Ian Ross, violin II; Val Rauch, viola; Kathy Augustine and Natalie Spehar, cello; and Stephan Alexander Parker on hammer, 2×4, and cymbal.

A Roadkill Opera was recorded, mixed, and mastered at Blue House Productions by Jeff Gruber.

The cast for the live improv/comedy recording Roadkill!!! Greatest Hits! includes Christopher Dews (2016); Ed Bachtel (1988, 1992); Stephan Alexander Parker (1988, 1992); Louise Gignoux (1992); and Dave Rohrer (1988, 1992). Rohrer is also responsible for writing and performing the newly released studio recording “Jackson Hole,” which is the first track on the side Roadkill!!! Greatest Hits!

Ferdinando Paer (Composer) was active in Vienna, Dresden, and Paris. He was a regular participant in the thrice-monthly private concerts put on by (and for the personal amusement of) Marie Therese at the royal court of Vienna, Austria. The Empress would assemble talented amateur and professional singers and musicians (similar in size and make-up to the group that recorded A Roadkill Opera) to play mixed concerts of sacred and secular music from her vast collection of scores and parts. 

Paer wrote dozens of operas. Leonora, the first act from which the score for A Roadkill Opera was derived, was his 40th opera. It is the same story as Beethoven’s first and only opera, Fidelio. Chicago audiences have a rare opportunity to productions of both this season, as Lyric Opera of Chicago presents Fidelio September 26 & 29, as well as October 2, 5, and 10, while Chicago Opera Theater presents Leonora October 1, 4, and 6, 2024.

Go there: 

Vintage Vinyl (925 Davis Street, Evanston, IL, 60201), 2 pm, Saturday, October 5, 2024

Order online:

Vintage Vinyl mail order division https://vvmo.com/ or mail@vvmo.com

A Roadkill Opera is a mashup of a backstage screwball comedy set in 1988 Wyoming with music from Ferdinando Paer’s 1804 opera Leonora. It tells the story of the hour before the lights go up on the first professional gig for an amateur comedy improv troupe–the Roadkill On A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company–at the legendary Silver Dollar Bar in the Wort Hotel in Jackson Hole. During that hour, they find out their showroom will be torn down after their run. Hilarity ensues.

This music documentary combines footage from A Roadkill Opera‘s 2016 live shows at the James Lee Community Theater in Falls Church, Virginia, and the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint in Washington, DC; a brief segment from an Artomatic 2012 workshop in Crystal City, Virginia; and excerpts from the 1988 and 1992 Jackson Hole comedy revues by the Roadkill On A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company. It features the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia’s fully staged performances.

With action set in the 1980s, the over-the-top production as chronicled employs presentational and naturalistic theatrics; borrows tropes from Sherlock Holmes, the Marx Brothers, vaudeville, silent movies, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus; and nods to King Kong, Marie Antoinette, and the Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys. Works by Weird Al Yankovic and PDQ Bach belong on the same playlist as the soundtrack to A Roadkill Opera.

English, with English supertitles. 83 minutes.

A Roadkill Opera!!! Recorded Live is a mashup of a backstage screwball comedy set in 1988 Wyoming with music from Ferdinando Paer’s 1804 opera Leonora. It tells the story of the hour before the lights go up on the first professional gig for an amateur comedy improv troupe–the Roadkill On A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company–at the legendary Silver Dollar Bar in the Wort Hotel in Jackson Hole. During that hour, they find out their showroom will be torn down after their run. Hilarity ensues.

The film combines footage from A Roadkill Opera’s 2016 live shows at the James Lee Community Theater in Falls Church, Virginia; the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint in Washington, DC; a brief segment from an Artomatic 2012 workshop in Crystal City, Virginia; excerpts from the 1988 and 1992 Jackson Hole comedy revues by the Roadkill On A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company; a segment filmed at the 2015 GRAMMY Awards; and behind the scenes at rehearsals for A Roadkill Opera.

With action set in the 1980s, this over-the-top production employs presentational and naturalistic theatrics; borrows tropes from Sherlock Holmes, the Marx Brothers, vaudeville, silent movies, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus; and nods to King Kong, Marie Antoinette, and the Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys. Works by Weird Al Yankovic and PDQ Bach belong on the same playlist as the soundtrack to A Roadkill Opera!!! Recorded Live.

————— The Score’s Backstory ————-

There was a 1798 two-act comic opera, Leonora, ou L’Amour conjugal. It had a French libretto by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, with the action set in sixteenth-century Spain—what is referred to in the opera world as an escape drama. The Bouilly libretto was set to music by Pierre Gaveaux.

Marie Therese, grand-daughter of Empress Maria Theresa, grew up in musical Milan and, when she wed her Austrian cousin and herself became Empress of Austria, brought her passion for music with her. She loved music; made copies, swapped copies, played, sang, and produced public concerts two or three times a year; and, three to ten times a month she would stage private concerts for her own amusement, amassing an ensemble of 12 to 16 musicians and singers to play for two or three hours. In her private concerts, Marie Therese would sing. And she would tell anyone who would listen that her favorite libretto of all time was Bouilly’s Leonora, and she wished someone would set it to new music for her. Within two years, there were not one, not two, but three new settings for her.

Paer and Mayr and Beethoven all worked in Vienna, and were all well-aware of the Empress’s generosity towards those who supplied her with new music. Ferdinando Paer, the Parma-born music director at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna and a regular performer in Marie Therese’s private concerts, moved to another court in Dresden while Austria was at war with Napoleon. It was in Dresden that Paer finished his Leonora for the Empress in 1804. The overture and first act of Paer’s Leonora are the musical basis for A Roadkill Opera. After Napoleon defeated the Austrians, Paer moved to Paris where he eventually headed up the Opéra-Italien, to be succeeded by Rossini. When Paer died in 1839, his Leonora was forgotten.

Forgotten, that is, until another musical denizen, intrigued by Beethoven’s high praise for Paer’s music, recovered Paer’s Leonora. Peter Maag found Paer’s Leonora while artistic director of the Teatro Regio di Parma in Paer’s home town. Maag was so taken with it that he mounted a radio production in 1976 and followed up with a 3-disc boxed set on London Records in 1978. After 140 years of neglect, Paer’s Leonora was back.

Praise

“Good luck at the GRAMMYs. How could you not win with a name like that?”
Ann Patchett, author of award winning
New York Times bestselling Bel Canto

“… a very, very, cool thing… exceptionally well done…”
Paul Barrosse, writer/performer, Mee-Ow Show,
Practical Theatre Company, and Saturday Night Live

“Songs like ‘Impress Them,’ ‘Cod Piece Dining,’ ‘Jello,’ and [Gonna buy my old granddad a] ‘Geo’ pair offbeat humor with beautiful vocals and music.”
Pam Schipper, Gaithersburg News Courier

“An inspired, imaginative work, technically worthy of the highest praise… the orchestration is faultless and complements the vocal parts beautifully.”
Peter Maag writes about Paer’s Leonora

“Roadkill… advances a medley of witty ideas and local jabs. The results are a stitch.”
David Swift, Jackson Hole News, writes about Roadkill!!! Comedy Revue

Live!!! A Roadkill Opera, with the greatest performances culled from the six fully staged live performances of A Roadkill Opera, is a 75-minute performance film submitted for screening at 2023 film festivals.

A Roadkill Opera  had its first workshop performance on June 9 at Artomatic 2012 in Crystal City, Virginia. The intertwined history of Artomatic and A Roadkill Opera was told in a 60-minute livestream as part of Artomatic‘s 20th anniversary in 2020.

See the trailers for the Artomatic 2020 livestream and the new feature film under consideration for film festivals in 2023!!

Incorporating photos and footage from live performances 1988 – 2016, with new footage contributed in August 2020 by Jeffrey Dokken, Stephan Alexander Parker, Jaylen S. Johnson, Val Rauch, Michael Thompson, Tanya Whisnant, and Christina Giles,Jeffrey Dokken, Stephan Alexander Parker, & A Roadkill Opera at Artomatic 2020 streamed live on Aug 15, 2020.

A Roadkill Opera was first prototyped as a script and mockup at Artomatic 2004 and workshopped at Artomatic 2012. From Artomatic 2012 we went into the studio—the commercially released recording got the creative team invited to the GRAMMYs in 2015, where we received a surprise announcement that the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia (SONOVA) would perform it the following year.

Jeffrey Dokken conducted the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia (SONOVA) on October 21, 2016, at the James Lee Community Theater in Falls Church, Virginia; and conducted other groups in January 2016 at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint in Washington, DC; in studio recordings at Blue House Productions in Kensington, Maryland, between January and June 2013; and at Artomatic 2012 in Crystal City, Virginia, in June 2012.

Music composed by Ferdinando Paer for Leonora (1804) was repurposed by Stephan Alexander Parker for this fast, funny mashup of classical music and a backstage screwball comedy about the hour before the first professional gig for the rude mechanicals of an amateur improv comedy troupe, the Roadkill on A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company, in 1988 Jackson Hole, Wyoming. New interviews conducted in August 2020 are mixed with archival photos, a bit of narration over the live, October 2016 Overture, and live performance footage from all the above with footage from the March 13, 1992, Roadkill!!! Greatest Hits! performance at the Pink Garter Theatre in Jackson, Wyoming.

So excited! None of this would have happened without Artomatic, SONOVA, Ed Bachtel, and Maestro Jeffrey Dokken! 

Frank Parker, pictured here at the trailhead for Lone Star Geyser in Yellowstone National Park, on metal-edged back country skis as he prepared to embark on his first cross country ski outing shortly before his 81st birthday.

Nashville, TN –Frank Leon Parker, age 96, passed away on August 10, 2022.

Internationally renowned nuclear waste disposal expert and elected member of the U.S. National  Academy of Engineering  Frank Parker was destined for a life of accomplishment, one could surmise, had they encountered him at his high school graduation in Somerville, Massachusetts. There, in 1943, stood a 6 foot 2 inch varsity football lineman and varsity basketball forward who, out of a class of 1,000 graduating high school students, took four of the seven academic honors presented to his class. Frank had already volunteered—enlisted in the Army—and had started classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while waiting to be called up. Not bad for the 17 year old son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants.

Once called into World War II service, he paused his education to build bridges and airfields in Nagasaki and test for radiation levels shortly after the United States and Allied forces vanquished Japan.

After the war, Frank earned his undergraduate degree from MIT and his masters and PhD from Harvard. He worked on water projects for the Bureau of Reclamation in Wyoming and electric transmission line projects in upstate New York state prior to completing his PhD. Frank then worked on projects for the Atomic Energy Commission at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop best practices in the disposal of spent nuclear fuel materials. 

A true scientist, Frank was insatiably curious about everything. He went on to generate seminal works in what are now seven distinct disciplines, ranging from hydraulics to law to the scientific foundations of the environmental sustainability movement. Innovation and institutionalization of scientifically sound policies were his hallmarks and are his legacy, carried forward not only through his books and hundreds of peer-reviewed publications, not only through the innumerable committees and commissions he served on or led, but also through the generations of leaders in countries across the globe who earned their advanced degrees under him or received his guidance and philosophy. Among the Vanderbilt University community members who found Parker unforgettable are developer, engineer, and president of Bluebird Consulting and Mason Realty Investors Steve Mason; Engineering Endowed Director of Construction Management Professor Sanjiv Gokhale; Bob Waters of Sandia National Laboratories; Peter Jaffe of Princeton University; and Steve Hays of Gobble Hays Partners Inc.

Ranging from his home institution of Vanderbilt University, where he retired as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Environmental Water Resources Engineering and Civil Engineering, and his home away from home in Vienna, Austria, where he spent time off and on from 1960 (at the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency) to 2013 (at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis), Frank lent his time and talent to the biggest nuclear and radioactive waste concerns on the planet, taking time out from his consulting to the U.S., Swedish, Japanese, French, Italian, German, Swiss, Indian, Pakistani, and Russian governments to guest lecture and teach short courses from Oxford, England, to the University of Tennessee. He visited Moscow 30 times, beginning in 1964 at the height of the cold war.

In the case of Lee Company v. North Carolina Board of Transportation, 308 N.C. 603, 611-13 (N.C. 1983), Frank’s expert testimony and the monograph he provided to the court set the precedent that a land owner is responsible for the downstream (and upstream) effects of changes they make to the speed and volume of water discharged from their property. The case has been cited in more than 40 legal opinions.

Parker’s two reports while a senior research fellow of the Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences were the only citations in the radioactive waste section of Madame Gro Harlem Brundtland’s pioneering 1987 United Nations report, Our Common Future. Brundtland established and was chair of the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development, best known for developing the broad political concept of sustainable development. The recommendations led to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Parker was a member of the Scientific Advisory Council for the International Radioecology Laboratory, Slavutych (Chernobyl). He served as a lecturer at Christ College, Oxford, in a United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority course and as a lecturer in the Italian Physics Society course on nuclear problems at Lake Como. He also was a senior research fellow of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria.

Parker was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for “world leadership in the development of the basic information required for safe disposal of high-level radioactive wastes”, the first from Vanderbilt and the only Vanderbilt member for 25 years. He presented invited papers at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the World Federation of Sciences annual meetings on Global Planetary Emergencies and the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the first engineer elected by eminence to the American Academy of Environmental Engineers.

Parker served as the first head of Radioactive Waste Disposal Research for the International Atomic Energy Agency where he reached ambassadorial level. He served as head of the Radioactive Waste Disposal Research Section of Oak Ridge National Laboratory during his 10 years there, where his research was the first ecological study of riverine contamination conditions and the first pilot plant development of disposal of high-level radioactive wastes in geological strata, Project Salt Vault. When the Kansas salt mine repository for nuclear waste was authorized for investigation, Frank proposed that a set of experiments should be performed in situ. The results informed repository and container designs for nuclear waste disposal, institutionalized through standards and national regulations. Frank went on to teach and research at Vanderbilt University, continuing to lead policy study teams through the National Academy of Sciences / National Research Council as Chair of the Board of Radioactive Waste Management, member of BEST and Report Review Committee, among others, and to provide technical reviews of, among other nuclear facilities, the Savannah River Plant, Clinch River Breeder Reactor, and Hanford Reservation.

Frank was the third person to receive the 2003 Wendell D. Weart Lifetime Achievement in Nuclear Waste Management Award sponsored by Sandia National Laboratory. He was selected for the honor by the Waste Management Symposium Board, which cited his “long and productive service in pursuit of safe and technically sound solutions to the disposal of nuclear waste.”

From 1997 to 2005 Frank supervised an international collection of post-doctoral students in the summer institute and co-authored about two dozen publications of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis at the Laxenburg Palace in Vienna, Austria.

The Erice International Seminars are multidisciplinary seminars attended by over 100 eminent participants from all fields of science. Each year, a few scientific issues are selected and experts are invited to present contrasting views during the plenary multidisciplinary sessions of the seminar, followed by general debates. These sessions offer a unique opportunity for specialists to enlarge their fields of vision by being confronted to the ideas and suggestions from high level scientists in complementary domains of science. Associated workshops allow the experts to further refine and process the ideas evoked during the seminar. In 2010, working from first principles, Frank presented a nuclear fuel cycle without refined nuclear materials that, if adopted, would all but eliminate diversion to nuclear proliferation and would significantly reduce the problems associated with nuclear waste disposal.

Frank was unanimously chosen to receive the 2018 W. Bennett Lewis Award for Sustainable Energy and Development from the American Nuclear Society. The award recognizes those who have made major lifetime contributions in nuclear science and engineering toward minimizing environmental footprints and attaining long-term global sustainable energy and development. Parker was recognized for his contributions to global sustainable energy and “the safe and efficient management of nuclear waste through his leadership and untiring efforts during a lifelong career in research and teaching.”

While traveling with Russian military officials in their vehicle, on a secret base in western Russia, working to help them solve problems with nuclear submarine waste, Frank was detained for hours by the KGB; ordered to pay a fine; and released without incident. Upon release after hours of detention, Frank asked if there was someplace nearby where his party could get something to eat. The KGB commander lit up and smiled, and told him “there’s a great restaurant I just ate at,” then frowned, continuing sternly—“you can’t go there. You are going to be escorted out of the forbidden area.”

Jack Daniel’s drinkers can rejoice in the knowledge that the water supply for this Tennessee sipping whiskey is assured, thanks in part to work by Frank Parker. The Jack Daniel Distillery purchased the 250 acres that feed its single source of water after scientific studies in the 1980s. Frank answered the question that others could not—what was the source of the water that emerged in the Cave Spring Hollow?

Married for 67 years to the love of his life, the beautiful and accomplished Elaine Parker, Frank traveled with her to some 60 countries, from the fjords of Nordkapp to the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, Australia to Argentina. While working in Siberia, he took colleagues on the weekend to Lake Baikal. It helped that his wife Elaine was a gourmet cook who, like his colleagues, was also interested in touring and eating adventurously. Frank and Elaine hiked and camped with their children all over the southern United States and in the intermountain west and northwest. Elaine passed in October 2021.

Frank played on the Somerville, Massachusetts, high school varsity basketball team where all five players in the starting lineup were over 6 feet tall—in 1943. He also started as a lineman for the Somerville High School football team. His high school football team scrimmaged with the MIT football team—and beat MIT. The only game MIT usually had was freshman versus sophomores. They would scrimmage with local high schools in preparation for that big game.

While squash was his preferred game, it was hard to find enough challenging players locally, so Frank switched to racquetball. He was in his 70s, playing racquetball with one of his graduate students, when one of his undergraduates playing in a nearby court challenged him to a game of doubles. Frank consulted his graduate student—did they want to take on the captain of the football team and one of his teammates? They did and won. The footballers couldn’t believe it and asked for a rematch—which Frank and his grad student also won.

Frank went cross-country skiing for the first time when he was 80, encountering a herd of wild bison on the Lone Star Geyser trail in Yellowstone National Park. You should see the video!

When wrapping up the Swedish project, he went with Elaine and one of his sons by train to the northern tip of Norway and took the classic Hurtigruten coastal boat servicing the isolated fjord towns during midsummer. There were few tourists. Elaine, having had her fill of seeing fjords, sought and was welcomed into the galley. Frank said the food served on the boat improved!

Frank was blessed with four children, Nina (Parker) Ganz, Aaron, Stephan, and David, together with five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren and many loving nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews. He is survived by his brother Gerald and preceded in death by his brother Arnold.

Services to be held at Congregation Micah on Sunday, August 14, at 1 pm. Memorials may be made in honor of Frank Parker to the Jewish Family Service of Nashville.

[A version of this obituary is available at https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/nashville-tn/frank-parker-10883585]

New for 2022 is Live!!! A Roadkill Opera, with the greatest performances from the six fully staged live performances of A Roadkill Opera. Watch for announcements once we find out (fingers crossed) if the full 75-minute film is accepted for screening at 2022 or 2023 film festivals.

Live!!! A Roadkill Opera has been submitted to film festivals under feature, music, comedy, and opera categories.

A Roadkill Opera  had its first workshop performance on June 9 at Artomatic 2012 in Crystal City, Virginia. The intertwined history of Artomatic and A Roadkill Opera was told in a 60-minute livestream as part of Artomatic‘s 20th anniversary in 2020. Jeffrey Dokken, Stephan Alexander Parker, & A Roadkill Opera has been repackaged for consideration for showing in film festivals in 2022 and 2023. The repackaged documentary will be released in 2023.

See the trailers for the Artomatic 2020 livestream and the new feature film under consideration for film festivals in 2023!!

Incorporating photos and footage from live performances 1988 – 2016, with new footage contributed in August 2020 by Jeffrey Dokken, Stephan Alexander Parker, Jaylen S. Johnson, Val Rauch, Michael Thompson, Tanya Whisnant, and Christina Giles,Jeffrey Dokken, Stephan Alexander Parker, & A Roadkill Opera at Artomatic 2020 streamed live on Aug 15, 2020.

A Roadkill Opera was first prototyped as a script and mockup at Artomatic 2004 and workshopped at Artomatic 2012. From Artomatic 2012 we went into the studio—the commercially released recording got the creative team invited to the GRAMMYs in 2015, where we received a surprise announcement that the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia (SONOVA) would perform it the following year.

Jeffrey Dokken conducted the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia (SONOVA) on October 21, 2016, at the James Lee Community Theater in Falls Church, Virginia; and conducted other groups in January 2016 at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint in Washington, DC; in studio recordings at Blue House Productions in Kensington, Maryland, between January and June 2013; and at Artomatic 2012 in Crystal City, Virginia, in June 2012.

Music composed by Ferdinando Paer for Leonora (1804) was repurposed by Stephan Alexander Parker for this fast, funny mashup of classical music and a backstage screwball comedy about the hour before the first professional gig for the rude mechanicals of an amateur improv comedy troupe, the Roadkill on A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company, in 1988 Jackson Hole, Wyoming. New interviews conducted in August 2020 are mixed with archival photos, a bit of narration over the live, October 2016 Overture, and live performance footage from all the above with footage from the March 13, 1992, Roadkill!!! Greatest Hits! performance at the Pink Garter Theatre in Jackson, Wyoming.

So excited! None of this would have happened without Artomatic, SONOVA, Ed Bachtel, and Maestro Jeffrey Dokken! 

In observance of National Women’s month here in March 2022, I’ld like to share this story.

Local Labor Notes: Lottie Stepansky as Cigar Stripper Union candidate 11 Jun 1915, Fri The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts) Newspapers.com

In a January 1907 article titled “Employment of Women in Industries: Cigar-Making: Its History and Present Tendencies” by Edith Abbott, writing from Washington, DC, on pages 1-37 of the Journal of Political Economy, some interesting observations–supported by evidence–are laid out.

The increased employment of women in cigar-making seems to indicate its tendency to develop into a “women’s industry” and furnishes an interesting example of the industrial displacement of men by women. The history of the industry makes it of peculiar interest, because originally the women were displaced by the men, and in these later years they have only come into their own again.

The manufacture of cigars in this country is an industry of nearly a century’s growth, but it has not continuously through-out its history employed a large proportion of women. This is, at first, not easy to understand, for it has always been a trade for which women are seemingly better qualified than men. No part of the making of cigars is heavy work, and skill depends upon manual dexterity–upon delicacy and sensitiveness of touch. A brief description of the three important processes in a cigar factory-“stripping,” “making,” and “packing”–will serve to make this quite clear.

The preliminary process, of “stripping,” which includes “booking,” is the preparation of the leaf for the hands of the cigar-maker. The large mid-rib is stripped out, and, if the tobacco is of the quality for making wrappers, the leaves are also “booked”–smoothed tightly across the knee and rolled into a compact pad ready for the cigar-maker’s table. Even in the stripping-room there are different grades of work, all unskilled and all practically monopolized by women and girls.

The stripping of the “filler” leaf for the inner “bunch” of the cigar is usually piece-work, but the stripping of the wrapper and binder is likely to be time-work, to avoid such haste as might tear the more expensive leaf. If a woman “books” her own wrappers, she gets higher pay than one who merely “strips ;” and one who only “books” gets more than either, for this is much harder work and keeps the whole body in motion. The scale of wages in a large union factory in Boston furnishes a measure of the supposed differences in these occupations: binder-stripper, $6 a week; wrapper-stripper who “books,” $7 a week; filler-stripper, $6 to $Io a week. The lack of skill in any of this work is indicated by the fact that in places where the union requires a three years’ apprenticeship for cigar-making two weeks is the rule for stripping, and competent forewomen say that “a bright girl can learn in a day.” In England the situation in this occupation is rather different. “The work is well adapted for female hands, and in provincial factories they are largely employed in this department. In London, on the contrary, there seem to be not more than thirty women engaged as strippers.” (Booth, Life and Labor of the People, Vol. IV, p. 224.)

Division of labor has been slow in making its way into cigar factories. The best cigar is, still made by a single workman, and the whole process demands a high degree of skill. Slightly inferior cigars, however, can be made with “molds” by less skilled workmen.

Wage disparity between women and men is a long-standing issue, as shown in these pages from Abbott’s article.

In observance of Women’s History Month here in March 2022, I’d like to share this story.

Previous readers of this blog have seen how Elaine Parker devoted herself to serving others, with a particular focus on services for the blind. That, and her other vocations along the way–training wedding directors on special needs weddings, for example, and helping establish the Middle Tennessee Professional Chefs Association–were accomplished in Tennessee in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, right on up until her 2021 passing. I will write more about her international, culturally informed wedding directing and culinary adventures–she visited 60 countries–in future installments. Miss Elaine, as many called her, wanted her obituary to focus on her positive accomplishments.

There is another aspect to her story, however, worth noting. She would not back down to the powerful in the face of injustice. As a woman heading a state program in the 1970s, she and another woman filed suit in 1974 charging that Tennessee State Welfare Department Commissioner Fred Friend’s plan to demote them was consistent with how Friend had “exhibited considerable hostility” toward them and their programs and had undertaken a “campaign of harassment” against them.

The Middle Tennessee Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) announced the formation of a legal defense fund for the women and the NASW itself contributed funds to their defense.

Mrs. Greta Hinds, director of the Food Stamp Program, and Mrs. Elaine Parker, director of Services for the Blind, charged Friend operated his department “in an arbitrary and capricious manner” and violated state and federal laws which control programs administered by his department, including violating the state affirmative action program and Executive Order No. 17 of Tennessee’s governor by replacing the two women with men.

Just prior to taking their case to Tennessee’s State Supreme Court in January 1975, Elaine Parker was notified by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that Tennessee ranked first in the nation in rehabilitating the blind.

The state had a 57% increase in rehabilitation of the blind in the latest HEW figures for July 11 through August 31, 1974. Nationwide, there was a decline in rehabilitation of the disabled, due to current economic conditions which made it difficult for an able person to get work.

Tennessee surpassed its goal for putting blind persons back to work more than any other state in the South. Elaine Parker’s office helped 433 blind persons go back to work. The goal for 1974 was 400.

Mrs. Parker, who had been in her position for three years, had also increased the income of blind persons running food stands in government and private office buildings. In 1971, the average income for stand operators was $4,992 and as of June, 1974 the average was $6,372.

Lawsuit over planned demotion of Elaine Parker 02 Jan 1975, Thu The Tennessean (Nashville, Tennessee) Newspapers.com

19 Sep 1974, Thu The Tennessean (Nashville, Tennessee) Newspapers.com

Friend’s plans were front page news on Friday, August 30, 1974.

Sources say four to be demoted 30 Aug 1974, Fri The Tennessean (Nashville, Tennessee) Newspapers.com

Sources say Friend plans to demote four workers 30 Aug 1974, Fri The Tennessean (Nashville, Tennessee) Newspapers.com

As reported by DOUG HALL in a front page story in the 22 January 1975 edition of The Tennesseean:

State Welfare Commissioner Horace Bass yesterday rescinded the controversial plans of his predecessor, Fred Friend, to reorganize the department and demote four key department personnel. “We just didn’t agree with the decision of Mr. Friend to begin with,” Bass said. “We think the demotions just weren’t justified.”

BASS MET YESTERDAY afternoon with Gov. Ray Blanton and discussed the matter, and Bass said Blanton “concurred completely” with the decision. Bass said the decision will take effect immediately. The decision to nullify Friend’s reorganization plans makes moot a lawsuit which had prevented the demotions of two of the employees, Mrs. Greta Hinds, director of the state food stamp program, and Mrs. Elaine Parker, director of services for the blind.

“I am pleased that the governor appointed a commissioner who has the compassion to rescind an order which disrupted the entire department,” said George Barrett, the attorney who represented Mrs. Hinds and Mrs. Parker.

22 Jan 1975, Wed The Tennessean (Nashville, Tennessee) Newspapers.com

It was a page 11 story the day before, 21 January 1975, where Hall wrote:

The State Supreme Court has indicated it will not rule on a motion to dismiss a suit brought by two department employees until the new administration makes a decision in the matter. Mrs. Elaine Parker, director of services for the blind, and Mrs. Greta Hinds, director of the state food stamp program, filed suit in Chancery Court here last September asking that Friend be enjoined from demoting them. Chancellor C. Allen High issued a temporary restraining order which has prohibited the demotions thus far.
Tennessee Supreme Court Declines to Intervene on Restraining Order Protecting Parker, Hinds 21 Jan 1975, Tue The Tennessean (Nashville, Tennessee) Newspapers.com
Parker and Hinds appear to have had some notion of the decision before it became public, as they issued invitations titled “Come Celebrate with Us” for Saturday, Jan. 18, 1975.

This blog draws considerably on reporting in The Tennessean, physical newspaper clips preserved in Elaine Parker’s files, and electronic clips from Newspapers.com.

Nashville, TN – Elaine Parker, age 91 of Nashville, passed away at home surrounded by her loving family on October 8, 2021.

Elaine would tell you that she had two great influences: Frank Laubach, who developed the “Each One Teach One” literacy program, and Helen Keller. “Do not let this go to waste” were the words that Helen Keller said to Elaine at her graduation ceremony, when Keller was presented as the first woman to receive an honorary degree and Elaine was the first woman to receive an advanced degree in teaching the blind from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This is an abbreviated version of a very full life. Newspaper clippings have been added to the text published in October 2021 in The Tennessean.

Helen Keller at Harvard Commencement – Page 1, 16 Jun 1955, Thu The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts) Newspapers.com

Elaine Marilyn (Goldman) Parker, was born August 6, 1930, in Boston, Massachusetts, daughter of Maurice Goldman (a state Senator in Massachusetts) and Helen Stepansky Goldman Perlman. Elaine was brought up in Boston, where she attended the Boston Latin School. She graduated from Drew Seminary for Young Women in Carmel, New York, where she studied piano and was active in theater.

One of Elaine’s earliest memories was volunteering with her Hungarian-born grandmother in cooking for—and writing to—World War Two servicemen through the Red Cross. Elaine later volunteered with the Boston Veterans Hospital and the New York Lighthouse for the Blind—experiences that contributed to her interest in working with people with vision disabilities.

Elaine first earned a Boston University School of Education degree in Special Education and Counseling, before going on to Harvard. A woman of many interests and passions, she began the first of her many careers teaching in public schools in Waltham and Brookline, Massachusetts. Later, she moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where she taught special education at the Daniel Arthur Rehabilitation School. At the same time, she developed and implemented an adult education program for the blind, founded a Recording for the Blind Program in Oak Ridge, and organized volunteers to bring Talking Books to blind families in the mountains of East Tennessee. Elaine was appointed Chairperson for the East Tennessee Employment of the Handicapped Program created under Governor Frank Clement. In this position, she visited numerous factories and businesses to encourage them to employ people who were blind and people with disabilities.

Instrumental in founding the Talking Book Program for the Blind for the Library for Congress, she took those skills and, when moving from Oak Ridge to Nashville in 1967, opened five adult education programs for the handicapped in Metro Schools.

She extended her work to help inmates at the Tennessee State Penitentiary.

She taught life skills such as shopping and cooking to those with vision disabilities and other disabilities at the Knowles Center for Senior Citizens.

She was then appointed Commissioner for the State of Tennessee Services for the Blind, where she instituted multiple innovative programs and opportunities for those in need of services including setting up a Braille transcribing program at a Nashville synagogue for parents of blind children and for Peabody College students.

In 1971, while still with the State of Tennessee, she founded a summer camp for blind children funded by the B’nai B’rith Maimonides Lodge, which ran for 37 years.

29 Jun 2005, Wed The Tennessean (Nashville, Tennessee) Newspapers.com

Later projects included the creation of the Low Vision Closet for Jewish Seniors in cooperation with the Jewish Family Service and B’nai B’rith Maimonides Chapter.

Mrs. Elaine Parker, public relations for the Professional Chef Association of Middle Tennessee 09 Jun 1977, Thu The Tennessean (Nashville, Tennessee) Newspapers.com

Elaine worked full time as a career counselor and taught culinary arts at the Nashville College of Applied Technology (then Nashville Tech), while creating an event planning and wedding business on the side. She opened Weddings by Elan after noticing the need for someone who specialized in wedding planning for couples with disabilities as well as for couples marrying from diverse backgrounds and countries. Not only did she assist in the planning and execution, she also traveled to many exotic places to coordinate wedding ceremonies. She shared her insights in four books:

•Wedding Directing: How to Be a Professional Wedding Director

•Directing Weddings at Hotels: A Training Manual for Staff

•Wedding Directing and Coordinating: A Training Manual with Challenging Stories and Scenarios

•Special Needs Weddings: A Guide for Persons with Visual, Hearing, or Mobility Challenges

Married for 67 years to the love of her life, Frank L. Parker, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University, she accompanied him to over 60 countries where they enjoyed the sights, food, and culture. In their travels, she amassed a collection of wedding figurines from each country, together with menus and cookbooks representative of the local customs, which she used to illustrate her nationally-recognized books.

Elaine wrote or contributed to numerous cookbooks, most recently as project leader for Safe Cooking Made Simple: Easy Recipes for Your Toaster Oven, Slow Cooker, and Microwave, privately published by Jewish Family Service of Nashville. Elaine was working on a book on multi-cultural weddings.

Elaine was a lifelong lover of music and the arts, with season tickets to the symphony, theater, opera and ballet, and attended Broadway shows, events, and lectures whenever the opportunity arose. She learned Braille when she was 13 from an 11 year old blind student at a music conservatory when she was teaching him to play her favorite classical piano piece.

She gave wonderful parties at Cape Cod, being a New Englander at heart. She never lost her Boston accent, even though she moved to Tennessee in 1954. Elaine was an active volunteer, giving her time and expertise to many organizations, and was an inspiration to young women whom she befriended, counseled, and provided emotional support. Her volunteer work was recognized with the Chesed Award from the Jewish Family Service, whose community she touched deeply. Chesed is Hebrew for “loving kindness.” The Chesed Award is bestowed at the Chesed Dinner, JFS’s premier fundraising event where they honor their most dedicated volunteers and supporters while celebrating the work of the agency.

Blessed with four children, Nina (Parker) Ganz, Aaron, Stephan, and David, together with five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren and many loving nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews, Elaine spent considerable time with family and friends including those she called her “adopted” daughters. She put family and friends first at every occasion.

Services to be held at Congregation Micah on Tuesday, October 12, at 11 am. Memorials may be made in honor of Elaine Parker to the Jewish Family Service of Nashville.

Jeffrey Dokken, Stephan Alexander Parker, & A Roadkill Opera at Artomatic 2020

Many thanks to the hundred-plus people who either tuned in live for the livestream on August 15, 2020, or viewed the archived livestream (still available) in the month since it was broadcast. Extra thanks to those who shared it with their friends and those who participated in the live chat during the broadcast!

Incorporating photos and footage from live performances 1988 – 2016, with new footage contributed in August 2020 by Jeffrey Dokken, Stephan Alexander Parker, Jaylen S. Johnson, Val Rauch, Michael Thompson, Tanya Whisnant, and Christina Giles, this piece was edited by Stephan Alexander Parker. Technical direction by Ben Ganz.

A Roadkill Opera was first prototyped as a script and mockup at Artomatic 2004 and workshopped at Artomatic 2012. From Artomatic 2012 we went into the studio—the commercially released recording got the creative team invited to the GRAMMYs in 2015, where we received a surprise announcement that the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia (SONOVA) would perform it the following year.

Jeffrey Dokken conducted the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia (SONOVA) on October 21, 2016, at the James Lee Community Theater in Falls Church, Virginia; and other groups in January 2016 at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint in Washington, DC; in studio recordings at Blue House Productions in Kensington, Maryland, between January and June 2013; and at Artomatic 2012 in Crystal City, Virginia, in June 2012.

Music composed by Ferdinando Paer for Leonora (1804) was repurposed by Stephan Alexander Parker for this fast, funny, 59-minute mashup of classical music and a backstage screwball comedy about the hour before the first professional gig for the rude mechanicals of an amateur improv comedy troupe, the Roadkill on A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company, in 1988 Jackson Hole, Wyoming. New interviews conducted in August 2020 are mixed with archival photos, a bit of narration over the live, October 2016 Overture, and live performance footage from all the above with footage from the March 13, 1992, Roadkill!!! Greatest Hits! performance at the Pink Garter Theatre in Jackson, Wyoming.

So excited! None of this would have happened without Artomatic, SONOVA, Ed Bachtel, and Maestro Jeffrey Dokken!

Let’s start where we left off: A Roadkill Opera as performed by the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia. Christopher Dews as Marvin, the stage manager for the Roadkill on a Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company, hilariously improvises the prologue at the October 2016 performance by the full Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia of A Roadkill Opera. On the eve of the 2016 elections, Dews is both hilarious and topical as he breaks the fourth wall. Other excerpts from the show are at the bottom of this post.

Peter Kuttner, Cyndi Moran, and Eric Scholl produced directed (with executive producer Denise Zaccardi) The End of the Nightstick, a documentary that aired on PBS’s POV series on July 5, 1994. PBS described it: “This startling expose unravels a history of abuse of suspects by the Chicago police. For more than a decade, the press and authorities turned a blind eye to allegations of torture — including the use of electric shocks — until persistent grass roots organizations exerted enough pressure to prompt an official investigation, and eventually the dismissal of a ranking police commander.”

The workshop for A Roadkill Opera at Artomatic 2012 in Crystal City Virginia, taught us several things–including that we needed 10 musicians (not 8) and that we needed a skilled comic in the role of Marvin.

The lyric videos provide the studio recording with supertitles. The whole shebang runs 59 minutes. The overture has credits and still photos.

The first joke for the audience arriving for A Roadkill Opera‘s world premiere performances in January 2016 at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint was seeing a 10-piece chamber orchestra–with timpani–in a 42-seat black box theatre. Christopher Dews (as Marvin) proved so funny in rehearsals that the cast and orchestra were distracted. He opens and closes the January 2016 show.

The anniversary of the first time that a substantial portion of the music from Ferdinando Paer’s 1804 opera Leonora was publicly performed in the United States seems a good day to look at the long, strange trip that led to that being in the form of the June 9, 2012 stand-and-sing at Artomatic 2012 in Crystal City, Virginia, of Stephan Alexander Parker’s A Roadkill Opera under the baton of music director and conductor Jeffrey Dokken.

It started with a cold snap in Jackson, Wyoming in the winter of 1984-1985. For a week, the temperatures dropped to the minus 50s at night and only got to the minus 30s during the day. It was too cold outside for aerobic activity. I couldn’t afford to join a gym, and since I had just moved there to be a ski bum, I couldn’t afford to lose my aerobic capacity, either. Jackson sits at 6,237 feet above sea level. What to do? As I recall, there was a blurb in the newspaper about how Arthur Fiedler, longtime conductor for the Boston Pops, had been in great aerobic condition due to conducting.  There was room for me to wave my arms around in my rented room; it would be more fun if I did it to music, so I hunted through my cassettes for the longest piece of music I had.

My favorite classical cassette had been recorded off a broadcast by Chicago’s WFMT during the winter of 1979-1980. I hauled that out and waved my arms to it for a couple of days. It was fine, but wouldn’t it be even more fun if I was also following along to a printed score? I could barely read sheet music, perhaps that way I could learn to read music better. So I grabbed my cassette and took it to Mountunes, a music store in Jackson, to order a score. I asked them to listen to the cassette, which sounded like Mozart to me, to figure out which score to order. The staff didn’t know what opera I had recorded, but they were pretty sure it wasn’t Mozart. Over the next several years, whenever I traveled, I would stop into music stores (and even the Steinway piano showroom in Manhattan) and play my cassette for the staff. Nobody could identify the opera or the composer. However, they all agreed on the place to go to ask the most knowledgeable music staff on the planet.

That was the Weiner Staatsoper, the Vienna State Opera House, in Vienna, Austria. Like I was going to go there. Then, in 2003, an opportunity to travel to Vienna came up. As I was packing, I remembered to toss in my cassette. Once in Vienna, I stopped at other music shops as I made my way across the city. None of them recognized the opera on my cassette. I played it for the staff at the Wiener Staatsoper: they didn’t recognize it either. Then they said that some of their former staff had opened a CD store across the street. I then played the cassette f the staff at da Caruso; they didn’t recognize it, either.  But one of them said “My boyfriend knows everything about opera. Give me your cassette and I will take it home and play it for him.” It was my only copy—but I figured it was now or never, so handed it over to him. Sure enough, the next day there was a message at my pension: come on in, we have identified your opera. When I got to da Caruso, the boyfriend had written down not only the name of the opera and the composer, but also who sang each of the major roles and the Decca catalog number. I asked the staff at da Caruso if they had a copy in stock. They laughed. “That was the only studio recording ever made of Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora. It has never been released on CD.” Okay, so can you order me the vinyl? They laughed again. “It has been out of print for 20 years.” The mystery was solved, but the obscurity of the recording had further piqued my curiosity.

So a month after the da Caruso staffer’s boyfriend had identified the recording as Leonora by Ferdinando Paer, conducted by Peter Maag and released on London Records, a Decca company, in 1978, I was relating the story about the chase for the recording’s identity to my friend Bob as we sat having sidewalk beers in Minneapolis. Bob said “You know, there’s a really good used book store across the street. They also have records. You should try there.” I said, yeah, right, like they’re going to have it. But they did! This was 2003, when radio stations were converting from vinyl to CDs. The local public radio station had dumped its entire set of vinyl, which was sitting (nicely organized, I should say) in the basement of the used book store.  It was a boxed set with 3 LPs and what I learned is called a libretto, which is the Italian word for book, which is to say the lyrics. The libretto included with it both the Italian lyrics and their translation into English.  I had been chasing this thing for a long time. It did not have a price marked on it. Nervously, while trying to appear nonchalant, I spoke to the clerk: gee, I was thinking about buying this old thing, how much is it? He opened the box and slowly looked through it, calmly closed it, and pronounced “nine bucks.” I paid cash, in case it was a mistake or in case he might decide to up the price while running a credit card. Once I had paid, I asked why nine dollars. “Three discs, three dollars a disc. Nine dollars.” Whew!

Now, after a 25-year mystery being solved, I had a copy in my hot little hands. What should I do with it, just listen to it? I’d been listening to it on cassette for 25 years, so that would be anticlimactic. I should dosomething with it, but what? The first step, I figured, should be to really listen to it, and to do that I needed to rip it from vinyl to a CD. I bought a turntable by mail order to do so, and found when I had transferred the three discs that I had only been listening to the overture and the first act: there was a second act that I had never heard. I hated it! The first act was all pretty much in major keys and highly melodic. To my untrained ear, the second act sounded all minor key and depressing. So I attempted to rip just the first act and overture to CD, but it wouldn’t fit. Circa 2003-2004, a CD’s capacity was only about one hour and eight minutes. So I cut out the speak-singing portions from the first act, what I learned much later are called recitatives, and got it under 1:08. Now when I listened to the shortened version, it sounded like an overture and twelve songs. To me, that sounded like a show. If I was going to write it up as a show, what should it be? If I made it just a shortened version of Leonora, what would be the point? The shortened version had three men and two women in it. What should their characters be, what plot? I printed out the Italian lyrics from the libretto and tried to phonetically fit English lyrics to them while listening to the CD. “Oh cielo!”, which refers to the skies or the heavens, sounded to me like “No Jello?” That meant comedy. Another lyric in Italian sounded to me like “I’m gonna buy my old granddad a Geo!” My first new car had been a Geo. That was in the 1980s. 1980s, comedy, three men and two women. Hmm, I had a possible story to fit.

From 1988 to 1992 my comedy partner “Weird Ed” Bachtel and I worked together in a legal partnership, first starting and hosting the long-running open mic night at the Spirits of the West Saloon and starting July 4 weekend in 1988 our first stage show: Roadkill!!! Live! It was a sketch comedy revue that ran for eight weeks that summer at the Wort Hotel’s Silver Dollar Bar’s Showroom (technically the Greenback Lounge, but everyone just called it the Showroom). The libretto circa 2003/2004 had three men and two women, and our show 1988-1992 had three men and one woman, plus a woman who ran the box office. Could the twelve songs be fit to those five characters?  I used the search and replace function to replace the names of the Italian characters with the names from the troupe and box office of the Roadkill On A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company and started writing. To provide some drama, I needed to focus on the most dramatic time in the run—opening night, when nerves were highest. For a dramatic climax, I needed a plot twist. Well, we learned during the 1988 show that after our run the showroom would be torn down. That was pretty dramatic. It paralleled a standard improv premise I’d often seen and sometimes participated in: you are stuck on a burning el platform (the el being the elevated train). Using dramatic license, the information about the theatre being torn down would come during the opening night. Another script parameter: I would add no dialogue. The show would be sung-through, with only Paer’s music and lyrics where his librettist had lyrics. That would also keep the script short. And finally, I decided to set the show in real-time during the final hour before the first show. That would also simplify staging, costumes, etc.

When I finished the script (by ear to the CD), I wanted to get a feel for how it might play as a show. I put my new lyrics as supertitles in a video mockup over the Italian recording. If you didn’t speak Italian, you could watch the video and think you were seeing it simply translated into English. At least, that was my intent. It seemed to work pretty well when I first showed the mockup of Opening Night: A Roadkill Opera in One Act at Artomatic 2004 at the old National Children’s Museum in Washington, DC.The Warehouse Theatre said to let them know when we were ready to stage the show, they had space. With that motivation, I reached out to my high school friend Brad, then a music rights attorney in Nashville, to ask Decca for permissions to use the backing tracks from the 1978 recording for a community theatre stage production. Remember how the FM station in Minneapolis had dumped its vinyl for CDs? Well, about this time Napster was busy cannibalizing the record companies. Decca didn’t return Brad’s calls or letters. Like the rest of the recording industry, they were too busy losing their shirts to illegal file sharing. Without access to the rights to the only recording, I was stuck, I put my script aside and focused on promoting the photographs of the woman from the Roadkill!!! Live!box office, Debby “DJ” Choupin. Three years later, while preparing for her exhibit at Artomatic 2008, a miracle: the Bamford Opera announced that Paer’s Leonorawould have its U.K. premiere in the fall. Paer premiered Leonorain Dresden it 1804. It only took 204 years to make it across the English Channel. I began to correspond with the fellow preparing the conductor’s score and parts for the London premiere.

Like Peter Maag, Brian Clark had accessed Paer’s manuscript for Leonoraat the library. He was kind enough to send me a PDF of the conductor’s score, but my music reading skills weren’t good enough to tell whether the score he working from was the same as the one that Maag had recorded. I asked Deb if she wanted to go to London so I could hear this thing. She said yes! (p.s., we are still married!)

Our last night of a week in London was at St. John’s Smith Square, where the London Chamber Orchestra (the world’s first chamber orchestra, founded in 1948) was accompanying the Bamford Opera singers. As I followed the score and my script, I was also visualizing what the show might look like on stage. This thing might work! The 2008 arrangement didn’t sound quite the same as the 1978 recording (it turned out that Brian Clark and Peter Maag had accessed different versions of Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora, from different libraries), but it was mighty close and awfully available. Now I just needed to get the rights to use the score and parts prepared for the Bamford Opera by Prima la musica! for the London, UK premiere of Leonora in 2008. I had hoped to speak with the arranger at the London performance, but alas, he had not journeyed down from his home in Scotland. I wasn’t really sure how to broach the subject. The subject matter of my show might not be to the taste of this person who made his living converting library manuscripts of classical music into modern, performance-read scores and parts. Leonora had been by far the largest undertaking in the history of Prima la musica!  I dragged my feet, until I learned that there would be an Artomatic 2009—now I had a deadline. I spoke with Brian Clark by phone and let him know I was interested in acquiring the score and parts for the overture and the first act only, for a derivative work. How much might he charge for me to have a copy like that, with all associated rights? I asked “how much will it cost?” He asked “how much are you willing to pay?” I thought about it, and about how much work it would take to do an independent transcription from the library manuscript, and made what I considered to be a fair offer. Fortunately, he agreed. I later learned that his deal with Bamford had been on a per-performance use of the score, with a projected 10 performances, but Bamford had cut back and only actually had two performances. I came out of the blue with this deep interest in this obscure work. There was another twist, however: Brian didn’t want me send him the payment in Scotland, but instead wanted me to wire the money to a guy in New York. This wasn’t that long after 9/11, so I asked him to explain why. The answer was satisfactory—he had collaborators who transcribed music out of libraries all over the world for Prima la musica! to sell to clients all over the world. In order to avoid currency conversion costs, he wanted me to pay his guy in New York in American dollars. I was okay with that. So now, a mere 6 years after the staff at da Caruso had identified the music I had been chasing, and 30 years after I had recorded Leonora off the air from Chicago’s WFMT, I had the music files.  Brian Clark of Prima la musica! suggested I acquire a software program called Sibelius for preparing printable copies of the parts (“that’s what professionals use,” he said); it would also allow me to edit in the lyrics. Brian also suggested acquiring better simulation software for listening to the score—I chose Garritan Personal Orchestra. I now had way more powerful software than I would have needed if I could read music better, but I was very happy to be able to continue to work by ear—now, working with the actual score, which I could use royalty-free, to take the place of the mockup over the 1978 recording.  There were other capabilities of Sibelius that come in handy later.

At Artomatic 2009 at Navy Yard, DJ exhibited her photographs and I advertised for a producing organization. I began working with the Sibelius software to fit the lyrics note-for-note to the score. To track my progress, I counted the number of bars of music in the score and the number of bars that had lyrics. That would be 1,208 bars. Times two; one of the bonuses from the arranger was a piano/vocal score that could be used for rehearsing singers. So, 2,416 bars of lyrics. I guess its just as well that no producing organizations stepped forward at Artomatic 2009, as it took me another two years to fit my written lyrics to the orchestral and piano/vocal scores. The lyrics from 2003/2004 were fine story-wise, but there were too many words. In transcribing by ear to the 1978 studio recording, I had created about a third too many syllables relative to the note by note score. Opera singers (and their conductors) need it note by note. That took time. Once I had the score and parts completed in the summer of 2011, I needed to register them with the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. That, too, was a process. It also seemed like a good idea to join ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

Remember that 2004 mockup? I brought that on my laptop and brought popup banners and large prints of the score to my exhibit at Artomatic @ Frederick in the fall of 2011. Also, there was freeware at the time that allowed me to create the first karaoke versions of the songs from what I was calling Opening Night: A Roadkill Opera.  When I loaded these things online, I found that using a search engine to look for “Roadkill Opera” returned 5 million search results—and mine was number one! That seemed worth promoting, so I made up postcards and blew them up big for my Artomatic exhibit. Now that I had a score and parts ready to roll, surely I could find a producing organization?

During a “meet the artists” night at Artomatic@Frederick in the fall of 2011, I was standing in my display while the mockup played on my computer and a powered speaker. A 10 year old girl was standing there, listening and following the lyrics. One of the newspaper reviews of the Bampton Opera’s Leonora had noted that 10 year olds had left the theatre humming the melodies from the show. This seemed like validation of that finding. Then the little girl’s father walked over to the Roadkill Opera mockup and the little girl said “Look, daddy, it’s an opera about farts!” A Roadkill Opera is not entirely about farts—there is one song—“In A Clearing,” the second song, the third musical number if you count the overture—that consists of a discussion/debate/back-and-forth about how to make the show funnier. Oh well. Another reason for 10 year olds to like A Roadkill Opera.

Then a funny thing happened in early 2012. I was in the office of a colleague, Martine Micozzi, at my day job, and I noticed what looked like a music case on the floor of her office. “What’s that?” “Oh, that’s my flute.” “Why do you have a flute at work?” “I moonlight at the Symphony Orchestra of Arlington. We have rehearsal tonight.” “Hmm. I just wrote a new libretto to music from an obscure opera. Would you mind taking a look at it?” “Sure.” Once she saw it, Martine said “Gee, do you mind if I show this to my conductor?” “That would be great!” It was great—Jeffery Dokken was so taken with the score that he began lining up singers for a possible workshop even before we met. He was willing to serve as music director if I could secure rehearsal and performance space. Fortunately, after three years hiatus, there was an Artomatic scheduled for Crystal City, and Jeff was able to rehearse the singers and orchestra on various stages, and hold a stand-and-sing workshop concert on the Cherry Smash Stage on June 9, 2012. There’s a single-camera video shot by Ben Ganz (now the co-founder and CEO of Vego Pictures in Hollywood). It was sprawling room only. The people at Artomatic were extremely supportive and helped with the publicity. I ordered a bunch of swag and even got Hatch Show Print, the oldest letterpress print shop in the country, to produce a commemorative poster. The designer recommended dropping the Opening Night from the title, which is how the show got renamed A Roadkill Opera. Tee shirts, aprons, bumper stickers, bottle openers, and posters were available for sale. I even got to play hammer on 2×4. We workshopped the show with an 8 piece orchestra and 5 singers. That’s how we learned that it needed a 10 piece orchestra, 5 singers, and a non-singing comedian. There were very few recommended change to the score and lyrics, which is what we were after. “What do we need to do next?,” I asked Jeff? “We need to go into a studio and cut a demo. Then we can pitch the show to orchestras around the country.” “How long will that take?” “We can knock it out in an afternoon—three or four hours.” “Great! Let’s do it!” So we booked a studio—but that’s another story.

Anyhow, many thanks to everyone connected with Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora along its long, strange trip to A Roadkill Opera. It’s been a lot of fun, and we aren’t done yet!

What a great way to close out 2018! Former Bad Company bassist Paul Cullen headlined at Delaware’s Milton Theatre on Friday, December 28. Pouring his eponymous wine during the VIP meet and greet before the show, Cullen even found time to chat with the lighting strike crew from the 2016 world premiere production of A Roadkill Opera, speaking with Rich Gaudiosi and hopping on a call with RJ Gaudiosi.

Cullen, whose terrific show with Lower Case Blues sold out the Milton Theatre, had introduced A Roadkill Opera‘s executive producer/librettist Stephan Alexander Parker to the venue. The two had first met at one of Cullen’s events at Bay Bridge Cove in Stevensville, Maryland.

Among the items Cullen and Parker discussed at the Milton Theatre were tentative plans to bring a production of A Roadkill Opera there. In August 2018, Sam Calagione offered for Dogfish Head Craft Brewery to sponsor a show at the Milton Theatre, which is about a half-mile from the brewery.

It is a good match: the workshop stand-and-sing of A Roadkill Opera at Artomatic 2012 in Crystal City, Virginia, had been on the Cherry Smash Stage, sponsored by Heineken.

When the world premiere production of A Roadkill Opera was staged in January 2016 at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint in Washington DC, a liquor license and associated insurance were procured in order to allow for on-stage quaffing of quality beers by the cast. This makes thematic sense, as the action takes place in the showroom at the Silver Dollar Bar of the Wort Hotel, as a couple of rival whitewater rafting guides prepare their amateur improv comedy troupe for opening night of their first professional gig.

Getting more and more excited to reconnect with colleagues from last year and to make new connections at CD Baby’s DIY Musicians Conference 2018!

The 2017 edition was amazing, as recounted in “A Roadkill Opera’s Key Takeaways from CD Baby’s DIY Musicians Conference 2017.”

A lot has happened in the year since!

So here’s the thing: during this video shot at the GRAMMYs in February 2015, A Roadkill Opera‘s librettist (and, for the recording, one of the producers) Stephan Alexander Parker brandishes a pair of chopsticks imprinted in gold with the ideogram for “harmony” and lettering for A Roadkill Opera. The chopsticks were partly inspired by the knowledge that ASCAP’s President and Chairman Paul Williams likes squid. With the thousands and thousands of people at the GRAMMYs, Parker and A Roadkill Opera‘s conductor and music director (and co-producer for the studio album) Jeffrey Dokken were shocked and delighted to bump into Williams on the sidewalk after the show. Parker pulled a CD out of his pocket to hand to Williams, totally forgetting the chopsticks. That was 2015.

Well, at the ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop LA 2018, Parker finished a delivery three years in the making.

Parker: I hear you like squid.

Williams: I love squid!

Parker: Please accept these chopsticks.

Williams: Thank you. What is A Roadkill Opera?

You can’t make this stuff up.